Masako Miki: Night Parade of One Hundred Demons

Masako Miki: Night Parade of One Hundred Demons

The ICA San José is excited to announce our next Facade Project, Masako Miki: Night Parade of One Hundred Demons. The Facade Project will present a new commission that is part of Masako Miki’s most recent work, Shapeshifters. This series references the artist’s ancestral traditions of Shinto animism, utilizing yōkai (shapeshifters) characters from Japanese mythologies and folklore as a potent metaphor to explore the complexities of identity today. The simple translation of yōkai is ghosts, deities, or preternatural creatures and appears in various forms like humans, animals, natural objects, and man-made objects. Some are humorous and bizarre, and others are more menacing. The most powerful attribute of shapeshifters is that they embrace dualities and flourish because of their idiosyncrasies.

Since 2015, Miki has been exploring the story of the Night Parade of One Hundred Demons or Hyakki Yaghō, which refers to a parade of thousands of yōkai. This popular theme in traditional Japanese storytelling and art is sometimes depicted as an orderly procession and others as a chaotic riot. For the artist, this parade is an essential and fertile vehicle to develop the next chapter of Shapeshifters. 

The ICA San José is very excited to have the opportunity to commission this new work and introduce Augmented Reality (AR) as a way for Miki to realize her Night Parade of One Hundred Demons. By employing AR, the artist’s static 2D and 3D characters will become animated and enhance the potency of time-based storytelling to enhance her work experience.

About Masako Miki:

Masako Miki (Osaka, Japan, b. 1973) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work includes a wide range of materials. Miki’s playful and inviting watercolor drawings, felt, and Japanese animistic traditions, and folklore inspire her bronze sculptures and immersive installations. By offering unique interpretations of the ancient mythologies, she attempts to craft new mythologies concerning our cultural identity as social collectives. By celebrating non-binary identities and sharing inclusive narratives, Miki wants to invite open dialogue about our existing social injustice and inequity.

In 2021, Miki completed a public art installation of nine bronze sculptures commissioned for the San Francisco headquarters of Uber Technologies in Mission Bay. She also created an outdoor sculptural installation at the Coastal Cultural Park in Shenzhen, China, in late 2020. Currently, Miki is developing functional sculptures for the Minna-Natoma Art Corridor Project in collaboration with the San Francisco Arts Commission and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Previously, Miki was a resident artist at Kamiyama Artists in Residency, Tokushima, Japan; Facebook Artist in Residence, Menlo Park, Calif. and the de Young Museum. Her works are held in the Berkeley Art Museum Pacific Film Archive, Facebook, The Byrd Hoffman Watermill Foundation, Colección Solo in Madrid, Spain, and other private collections. 

Miki received her MFA from San Jose State University and lives and works in Berkeley, California.